Recently I have put some effort in organizing some of our video files. These are mostly home movies, kids doing stuff, places we visited etc.

I run however in a small snag. At some point we used to own Apple devices and the videos of the time were .MOV files, and some of them were really big in size. I therefore decided to convert everything into one format MP4.

For our latest phones (that is what we use primarily for recording said videos), that format is pre-selected to MP4 so no problem there.

Using Linux as my primary workstation, the operation is dead simple. All I had to do is use ffmpeg.

The command I used is:

ffmpeg -i kids.mov -vcodec h264 -acodec mp2 kids.mp4

The above will convert kids.mov to kids.mp4. Of course you can change the path of the input file and/or the output file.

For a MOV file slightly above 20MB I ended up with a MP4 file just below 4MB.